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How Does Lossless Work?

Does anyone know of any printed material that describes how ALAC & FLAC operate? These are lossless formats however, they are using compression. Is this format removing something or is it compressing then uncompressing on playback? Looking for hard evidence that these formats are in fact bit-for-bit equals, or not, to master quality AIFF's & WAV's.
3memike
dave_rosenblum
11 posts
 
Lossless compression is pretty simple. Say a string of 0s and 1s is like this:
00001111000011110000111100001111

FLAC says:
"Dictionary":
0000 = 2
1111 = 3
Content:
223232323

And now you see how it really is lossless, it just replaces the 2's and 3's with the 0000 and 1111 when you play it!

Dave the computer programmer.
piano632
19 posts
 
Exact Audio Copy (EAC) has a "Compare WAVs" tool which does a bit-by-bit comparison of 2 WAV files and will show you that WAVs compressed with FLAC, APE or whatever are identical to the original after they've been uncompressed back to a WAV file.
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Dave_rosenblum...My computer doesn't do "2" or "3".

2 = 1 0

3 = 1 1

and

4 = 100

5 = 101

etc.
.

I think you have oversimplified it.
dave_rosenblum
11 posts
 
I simplified it enough for non-tech people to get the concept. I know how computers work.
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